


Laugh the Last Always

by rednihilist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-02 20:45:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12733995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednihilist/pseuds/rednihilist
Summary: Sirius falls through the Veil and out another side.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: _Harry Potter_ and certain characters belong to J.K. Rowling, and also Heyday Films, Moving Picture Company (MPC), Warner Bros. Pictures, et al. 
> 
> No profit is gained from this writing—only, hopefully, enjoyment.
> 
> Soundtrack on 8tracks: https://8tracks.com/rednihilist/laugh-the-last-always
> 
> _Vivien._ (Catching sight of her image, and spreading her hand over the water.)  
>  Ah, my beautiful,  
> What roseate fingers!  
> (Enter Time as an old peddler, with a scythe, an hour-glass, and a black bag.)  
> Ha, ha! ha, ha, ha!  
> The wrinkled squanderer of human wealth.  
> Come here. Be seated now; I'd buy of you.  
> Come, father.  
>  _Time._ Lady, I nor rest nor sit.  
>  _Vivien._ Well then, to business; what is in your bag?  
>  _Time._ (Putting the bag and hour-glass on the table and resting on his scythe).  
>  Grey hairs and crutches, crutches and grey hairs,  
> Mansions of memories and mellow thoughts,  
> Where dwell the minds of old men having peace,  
> And--  
>  _Vivien._ No; I'll none of these, old Father Wrinkles.  
>  _Time._ Some day you'll buy them, maybe.  
>  _Vivien._ Never!  
>  _Time._ (laughing) Never?  
>  _Vivien._ Why do you laugh?  
>  _Time._ I laugh the last always.
> 
> “Time and The Witch Vivien” ~ William Butler Yeats

Sirius isn’t surprised, although he knows he should be. He should be shocked and angry and miserable. That might just be the appropriate response to such as his situation. After all, everything has changed for everyone else, and nothing has changed for him.

(Or is it the other way around?)

But, with everything that happens once he’s managed to escape fucking Azkaban, Sirius doesn’t even realize what’s missing for months, for months and months and months, if he’s honest, and by then he’s accustomed to it. By then, already months into the Triwizard Tournament, a farce of a competition that somehow deems it necessary to include his 14-year-old godson as the fourth competitor in a game of fucking three, Sirius is still continuously fighting to put on a good face, still having to relentlessly work at feeling something other than just frantic and hunted and the basest of scum.

He hasn’t changed, while every single thing, every single thing has.

So he maybe falls back into bad old habits, grasping for something familiar.

(His first clue should be how easily he remembers his own flaws.)

But it’s only natural, coping mechanisms or something.

Sirius diverts and redirects and makes excuses and plays dumb, plays down to everyone’s negative expectations, plays to the crowd, aims for a reaction, any reaction, and he does it even as he thinks he should know better.

But if someone is shouting at him in his parents’ now-decrepit kitchen or trying in vain to talk over him during an Order meeting or sneering at him with an uncannily aged face or doubting his word about his own abilities then he knows they’re all here, and it’s happening now, and he’s Sirius Black with his bogwater reputation and cursed luck, escaped Azkaban prisoner, acknowledged animagus, and all-around loose canon.

If he’s Sirius here and now, even in his family’s house, then he’s not in Azkaban, even when he forgets or can’t remember or gets lost in the haze.

If he talks back, even to McGonagall, even to Dumbledore, and especially to fucking Snivellus, then he’s not alone and silent or alone and screaming or alone alone alone locked in a stone cell forever.

Besides, Sirius isn’t sure he even knows how not to be defensive.

He isn’t sure of anything anymore.

(He’s Sirius still, isn’t he?)

If he’s a hothead, he’s understandably unstable, unstable for the right reasons. He gets irritation and some pity but not fear, not worry.

If he’s a hothead, people don’t want to be alone in a room with him, and they don’t want to look at him any longer than is absolutely necessary. He gets the benefits of interaction without the threat of intimacy.

It’s not perfect, of course.

But it’s familiar, this dodge, this role-playing, (and that should be his second clue).

He underestimates some people, though, and is just plain unfamiliar with others.

And then there’s Moony.

Remus is a puzzle because he’s both familiar and unexpected.

Sirius knows Remus.

Sirius doesn’t know this Remus at all.

(Sirius is sure he knows Remus. He’s certain.)

Padfoot knows Moony from the start, and picking up the wolf’s scent in and around Hogwarts is more a homecoming than Sirius actually stepping foot back in his childhood house.

12 Grimmauld was never home.

One night, Remus murmurs, “Had to grow up,” in response to Sirius’s slip about how different everyone seems. Remus then runs his hand back through his hair, impatiently swiping it off his forehead.

The gesture has Sirius immediately stilling, his own hand stopping mid-air with his tea halfway to his mouth. His breathing speeds up, quick pants that make his head spin and his heart feel as though it’s about to punch through his chest.

What’s worse is he can’t even keep his reaction under wraps, Moony’s wolf eyes still too keen.

“Hey, breathe,” Remus says, slowly reaching out and brushing his fingers over Sirius’s where he’s clutching his mug. Sirius wants more, even as he’s all but recoiling because what he doesn’t want is Moony’s pity. “Pads,” Remus says, “Sirius, hey, it’s all right. Just deep breaths. We’re ok. We’re right here and just talking. Everything’s fine.”

Remus is so unexpectedly understanding and calming.

It comes as a shock. Sirius can admit he’d been expecting a certain amount of disapproval.

(That right there should have been Sirius’s third clue.)

He knows that gesture, though, that toss and flick of Remus’s wrist, but at the same time—he can’t remember ever having seen Remus move like that.

It takes him awhile to realize that it’s not that he knows that gesture but that he knows he should know it.

It’s not what’s there but what should be, what used to be, what once was: what’s fact for everyone else and lost to only him.

Panic, terror, and grief are Sirius’s companions in this awful alien world because, although it takes him awhile to realize, the truth is that he’s actually grieving for what he can no longer recall.

What’s been wasted, what’s died, is more than the 12 years he was in that cell, the years he could have spent with Remus, looking after Harry, and having some kind of life of his own.

What’s lost is more than regrets.

And it’s not as though it’s the end of the world—not with Moldyshorts again wreaking havoc and murdering everyone who’s not some pretentious inbred bigot, not in the grand scheme of things where Sirius is barely a footnote in either war, and not in relation to those around him like Dumbledore and Harry and even Remus, the old fogey—but what should surprise Sirius once he’s escaped Azkaban and managed to live in the new world for awhile yet doesn’t is the fact that what vanished from his mind like smoke and what was sucked out of him over the course of 12 years are all the moments that made him _him_.

Sirius used to be more than he is now, more than a joke or cautionary tale.

He thinks he was more, anyway.

All he’s left with now are the spaces formerly occupied by memories and experience.

He’s left with crumbs and the plate and only a vague notion of the dish itself.

Maybe it’s justice.

Maybe it’s a sick, deserved kind of irony that he can remember Bella better than Jamie, Reg and Peter in greater detail than Lils, and every single interaction with Severus gods be thrice damned Snape better than any moment ever with Moony.

Sirius remembers each and every word he used to lure Snape down the Willow tunnel on that full moon in sixth year and not a single second of kissing Remus.

He knows he kissed him. He knows he did more than kiss him, but he can’t remember anything.

And he doesn’t know his own godson at all.

And he doesn’t even want to know himself.

He’s terrified.

Because even with his head as constantly empty and leaking as a sieve, there’s barely any room left for aught but survival, and Sirius as he is now can only be a hothead, a loose canon.

Especially to himself.

If he’s something else, it’s pathetic, a relic, a nightmare he can’t wake up from.

He’ll be the bogeyman and the villain and the ghost in the house terrorizing children.

Maybe, likely, almost certainly, he was actually the worst of all four of them.

And it’s not as though Sirius had exactly thought about in detail what his life would be like if he did manage to escape Azkaban, not beyond just the possibility of not being in a cell surrounded by his insane evil relatives and fucking dementors feasting on his soul.

But this, whatever this is, is still proving something of a letdown.

Jamie’s still dead. Sirius knew that. He did. He knew everything had changed.

But it hadn’t for him, only for everyone else.

He doesn’t want to think about, much less unpack, the baggage he’s dragging behind him, but he’s nevertheless disappointed no one even tries to approach him or address the fact that he’s undoubtedly acting weird.

But then, no one here in this alien world seems to know him.

Not even Remus.

No one knows him anymore.

(Is that the nightmare or the silver lining?)

But then Sirius can’t honestly say he knows Moony all that well anymore, not like he thinks he once must have.

But Remus doesn’t even seem to be trying.

At first, it’s just a few days that Sirius has been free, just a handful of days following that desperate paddle to shore, and he has barely any room to spare in his search for Wormtail.

Moony is alive; Moony is at Hogwarts (again).

Suddenly, it’s the first time in over a decade that he’s seeing his godson, Harry, Prongs’s get, Lily’s, (oh, Merlin), Lily’s son, and Sirius knows he has to protect him, look after him.

He can do that. He can watch over Harry.

(He almost remembers that kid.)

And he has to get that dirty fucking traitor rat.

Wormtail, Sirius thinks on repeat, has to die so that Peter can be redeemed.

Or is that, he wonders, the other way around?  

Then Sirius blinks, and it’s been weeks, a month, two months he’s been free, four months, and he’s managed to sneak back onto Hogwarts grounds, but it’s a constant struggle to keep it together, to keep focused.

He keeps losing it, time and memory slipping through his fingers, his paws, his consciousness.

Little Harry isn’t James, and he isn’t Lily, and he isn’t little.

He’s a stranger.

Flies well, though. Merlin, the kid flies like a bird.

Padfoot sneaks into the stands and happens upon Moony’s scent and old Dumbledore’s and McGonagall’s.

And Snape’s.

And there’s Wormtail.

(And in 12 years, Sirius has been Padfoot more than he’s been Sirius.

He sometimes fears he’s forgotten what it’s like to be human.)

And then it’s several months after Azkaban, Azkaban, for Godric’s sake, and Sirius is losing what scant patience he had.

It’s half a year and more, and suddenly he and Moony are side-by-side and face-to-face with that fucking coward Wormtail.

(But, no, more happened in between.

More happened before that he won’t ever be able to recall, and more happens afterward that he can’t bear to remember.)

Peter was their friend longer than he was their betrayer.

Sirius was thought their betrayer—and he’s not crying in his barren stone cell as he realizes this, and he’s not crying in his filthy pureblood family’s bathroom as he realizes this, and he’s not crying in a dank cave just outside Hogsmeade as he realizes this—longer than he was considered their friend.

Or is it, he wonders desperately, the other fucking way around?

For months, it’s like an in-joke he’s not privy to: he walks into rooms, rooms in the old familiar house he can recall intensely hating but can’t, for the life of him, remember ever leaving, and everyone suddenly clams up.

It’s personal, and the dandy in him takes offense even as the martyr begs for more.

Living back in Grimmauld is nothing if not like being a child all over again, like being a first-year, back when Jamie was a stuck-up, spoiled, pompous little shit who lumped Sirius and Snivellus into the same Dark category and mercilessly mocked them both well past Yule. First year all over again, back when Remus and Petey steered clear of Sirius because of his ridiculous temper and constant scowling and James Potter’s fucking disdain, and he wrote home to Reg every other day.

(There was a letter he remembers writing, sealing, mailing, and receiving a reply to, all about how he wished he’d given in and been a better Black, about how he, Sirius, wished he were more like Regulus. It’s not a happy memory, neither the writing nor the reply, so that’s likely why he can pull it effortlessly out of the morass his head is these days.)

And doesn’t Sirius constantly feel like an 11-year-old again, doubted and second-guessed and valuable only for his name and 12 Grimmauld and all the gold in the Black vault?

Time’s been slipping for him for more than a decade now, but it’s somehow worse once he’s back in his family’s nasty old house.

He tries not to be caught alone, but that’s futile. Everyone else already has a home, even Moony.

And so there are moments when Sirius missteps, when he stumbles back or sideways and blinks.

And he’ll find himself once more leaning belligerently against a wall at one of his parents’ holiday parties, the guests all horrid imbeciles wetting themselves over the latest gossip from the East, supposedly about some numbskull finally putting Muggles in their place.

Or he’ll be brewing tea and abruptly have to dodge a swipe from one of his mother’s elves as he  tries to sneak a biscuit.

He’s suddenly hiding under his sheets, bloody crescents digging into his palms as he tries to keep quiet.

Sirius is now in his thirties, and the house is his now by rights, but he swears he catches sight of Reg hanging around outside the second floor bath in the mornings, waiting his turn, patient as always but all morose slouching and reproachful eyes and full-bodied sighs.

Sirius swears he can smell his father’s cologne everywhere in the house but especially in the library.

He swears he overhears his mother constantly grumbling about her ungrateful children and embarrassment of a brother-in-law.

He hears Bella laughing in the room next to his when he’s trying to fall asleep.

He’s down in the kitchen for dinner with Molly and Arthur Weasley, and Moony, and Andy’s daughter, and Dung, and old Doge, only Sirius looks up, and it’s suddenly another Yule with the family.

He bites his tongue and ignores Moony’s searching look.

Sirius can’t call up Jamie’s face or really quite catch the exact timbre of Lily’s triumphant laugh, and he spends an inordinate amount of time upstairs with Buckbeak the hippogriff, but he’s not in Azkaban anymore.

Is being trapped inside Grimmauld worse than being imprisoned in Azkaban?

He doesn’t know the answer.

He hides and deflects and isn’t ashamed of doing so.

There’s no room for regrets. Or maybe there’s only room for regrets. Sirius isn’t sure.

He thinks about setting all this down on paper, telling his side of the story, maybe leaving it as a record for Remus or even Harry, should the poor kid somehow make it out of all this alive. Sirius thinks of their Map, of the Padfoot that lives inside with the Marauders. He thinks of the him that lived back then.

What a fool.

It’s days and then weeks, months, years, and he’s sniping at Snape and mooning over Moony and worrying about Harry, and he’s a disgrace and yet somehow a role model, and then he’s falling, slipping, and then time is slipping even further sideways.

And Sirius is gone.

(Or is he found?)

And then someone’s chilly hand is cupping his cheek.

“Sirius?” a voice asks.

The same hand then pats him hard on the cheek a couple times, almost but not quite slapping him. “Wake up, you daft fucking fool, and open your cursed eyes. Spare me,” the decidedly male voice says, the voice Sirius is slowly realizing he knows all too well, “the pureblood theatrics and get off your wretched canine ass.”

Sirius opens his eyes, and Snape is looming over him.

Sirius blinks, and it’s still Severus Snape.

It’s still Snivellus, all nose and baritone and dark hair and censorious eyes.

And, with a quick glance around them, Sirius can tell they’re still in the Ministry.

But Snape’s expression is strange, and Sirius himself feels strange. His right knee isn’t aching like it has, if he’s honest, for years, ever since he twisted it back in that autumn following graduation when he and Gideon had had the bright idea to attempt to redirect those three Death Eater wannabes away from Diagon. Likewise, the knot of pain in his left temple is noticeably absent, the spot right beside his eye where he’d been grazed by one of MacNair’s infamous cutting curses back in the dark months between Jamie and Lils going into hiding and. . . .

“Wha– ?” Sirius manages to croak.

Because this is all wrong.

Snape can’t be here in the Ministry. He’s a dirty fucking spy and can’t risk his foul Death Eater mates seeing him fight alongside blood traitors and Muggle-loving Order shills.

Sirius’s memory is for shit, but he knows enough about the Department of Mysteries to hazard a guess as to what tripping into a Veil means for his mortality.

And that’s his first clue.


	2. Chapter 2

He closes his eyes, desperately looking away from Snape’s face with its bizarrely soft expression, not wanting to even scratch at what he fears might just be the truth of the situation.

How does he keep landing in these messes?

Of course, lack of sight only intensifies his hearing, jolting the racket of the ongoing skirmish up into nigh on unbearable, the crackling of curses and counter-curses rendered excruciating, the dead thump of a spell missing its human target and striking instead stone or wood or dirt, as well as the tearing sound of Death Eaters showily apparating around the cavernous hall, all but deafening.

In the epic tales, no one ever mentions the shouting, grunting, and screaming.

Or the laughter.

Sirius’s eyes fly open before he’s even put a name to that sound, that familiar heaving, rolling crescendo, that ululating gloating that still manages to hit each and every one of his nerves like some toddler having a rough go at Mother’s heirloom harpsichord. Sirius would recognize that cackle even if he were deaf.

He recognizes it now, even though he thinks he must be dead.

(Wouldn’t this be an appropriate afterlife for him, to eternally find escape in a battle in which he trips and falls, blunders and stumbles into his own death?)

Another shriek of laughter bounces around the hall like a curse, and Sirius pushes Snape off and away from him, and then he staggers to his feet to go and meet the hag, face-to-face again in this, a different world than when they were kids or teens or, once, on opposites sides in a different battle.

In his hand is his wand, his old wand, the wand he’d carried until they’d snapped it when he was abruptly sentenced, the wand his mother bought for him from Gregorivitch in Carkitt Market all those many years and lifetimes ago: hawthorn and coral, 12 inches, oval instead of round, bumpy, with ridges and grooves that still, again, have always perfectly fit his hand and his fingers.

(Hawthorn: Sirius is still slightly bitter about the fact no one ever told him what that wood signified.)

That night at dinner, Mother had all but gloated to Father, to Reg, “Coral’s famous for rejuvenation and transformation, of course. Our little star will undoubtedly shine brightest. Blood will out, after all. Mark my words, this is a new age for our Noble and Most Ancient House.” She’d looked at him and said, eyes bright like molten silver and a grin that has him recoiling in terror even now in memory, “Sirius will bring our world to order, won’t you, love?”

Now, he’s standing, old hawthorn once more in hand, back right where he left off, almost.

Everything’s skewed.

And maybe caution would dictate he fall back and let someone else take over, let someone, even Snape, who’s still right at his side, know that this isn’t right.

But what’s life without a little risk?

It’s still his fight. Hers is still the same cackle he hears in dreams, nightmares, and moments when he’s awake but somewhere else in his head, when he’ll blink and blink and suddenly realize he’s in a different part of Grimmauld, at a different time of day, than he left off. It’s Bella who taunts him, who’s always terrified him more than any other

It’s Bella who’s the actual living embodiment of their House, not Sirius and not Reg and not Andy or even Cissy.

Sirius looks up, and there she is, staring right back at him with that fucking smirk on her face.

And he isn’t sure if he’s a dog or a man, guilty, innocent, alone or surrounded, alive or dead or something else altogether, but he knows Bellatrix, and he knows he hates her.

He rushes her, not through spells, hexes, or jinxes. No, Sirius runs towards the itty bitch and bodily tackles her to the stone, pinning down her wand hand before she can even choke on her sick startled laughter.

“Blood traitor!” she hisses at him, her eyes dancing.

(She feels the same rush he does.)

Sirius snarls and lifts her wrist, slamming it down again, hard, which weakens her grip enough to send her wand rolling away.

Then he spits in her face.

Then he meets her crazed eyes with his own, grey to grey, volatile like all their family, their cult he managed to just barely claw himself free of, and he bites out, “You’re pathetic; you’re a disgrace!”

(He’s still not looking too deeply, still just skimming the surface, but even he pauses a second to wonder if he’s actually referring to Bella there.)

It comes to him then: unyielding.

Sirius is here in the Ministry, fighting for the Light, fighting again for the right side, the good side, but he’s not where he belongs. He can feel it in his bones and behind his eyes. He can taste his failure at the back of his throat.

Where is home? Where and when did he ever have a home?

He’s a Black.

“Bloody Blacks,” James had said, back when they weren’t anything to each other, “that’s what everyone calls you. You’re all as dark and foul as shite on a troll!”

Sirius’s great retort had been, “Not as foul as your breath, Potter!”

Hogwarts with Jamie and Remus and Peter had almost felt right, felt like what he’d learned home should feel like. Hogwarts as a Marauder was the only time, the only place he knows he was mostly always himself and didn’t worry that often about thinking wrong thoughts or saying the wrong thing.

He knows it was like that, even though he can’t remember much of it.

They forgave him, though. Remus forgave him sixth year. Jamie forgave him. He knows they did.

But Sirius is a Black.

Pureblood will out?

Almost like a friend during his time in Azkaban, the thought that maybe he belonged there, that maybe this was finally his home, comforted him. Everyone thought him guilty; easy to float along downstream.

And if he were guilty of betraying the Potters to the Dark Lord, he was innocent of being an embarrassment to the House of Black. If he were condemned by one side, he had to be commended by the other, right?

He was a Black, after all.

Twelve years is a long time, and it’s even longer in Azkaban. He spent a lifetime in that cell, a few lifetimes.

And Sirius doesn’t talk about his time in there, not to Moony or Harry or McGonagall, the few times she hints in that direction, and not to Dumbledore—but then Dumbledore never asks or hints. Dumbledore always leaves well enough alone.

(Albus, Sirius has learned, knows when to keep his mouth shut about certain—topics.)

The truth is ugly, and Sirius hopes, prays, begs no one has ever guessed the whole of it.

The truth is that for a large chunk of time Sirius was a dog, tail over nose in the corner of his stone cell, Padfoot whimpering and cowering as far from the cold dark clouds as physically possible.

That’s simple, straightforward. That isn’t unexpected.

It gets complicated, though, because for an equally large chunk of time Sirius believed he was once more the beloved son of his House. He was a man, still cowering and whimpering in his cell, still straining to get as far away from the cold dark clouds as physically possible, but he was also Sirius Orion Black, and he could somehow, from time to time, manage to convince himself he’d ultimately done the right thing. He hadn’t failed if he’d aided his family.

Sirius wasn’t totally lost if he were once again reclaimed. Mother and Reg wouldn’t abandon him if he’d proven himself in the end.

Never mind the fact Reg was dead.

Never mind the fact Sirius hated his mother.

Others, friends, might be dead, dead, dead and staring up at him from the stairs as he passed them, dead and staring up at him from the floor of the baby’s nursery as he found his vision cloudy and someone made a horrible moaning sound, dead but for the wailing of the baby in his crib, dead, dead, dead silence all through the rest of the house, but Sirius’s mother and Sirius’s brother would take him back in when they found out.

He wouldn’t be totally alone.

(Bella, down the hall, would chortle when she found out he’d come through in the end.)

It was ugly and false, and that’s why he’d been able to keep it alive in prison, but Sirius had believed Reg would embrace him, would welcome him back with open arms if only Sirius willingly stepped back into the fold.

Sirius almost always knew James and Lily were dead, and he saw their bodies crumpled on the stairs and down on the floor in vivid detail over and over again throughout his stint in Azkaban, but he couldn’t ever quite put together all the facts in the correct order.

For a large chunk of time, after all, Sirius thought he’d murdered them.

(He knew he didn’t, but it was so easy to simply float along downstream.)

He thought he’d murdered Peter and Remus too.

And for an embarrassingly long time, Sirius believed he’d helped kill baby Harry.

He squeezed through the rough bars of his prison cell, the iron scraping his sides as Padfoot, and then he fell a long way down to the water, and he paddled and paddled until he finally staggered onto land, and in all that time he thought of nothing beyond escaping, nothing but getting away from the bad thoughts and the cold dark clouds that always hurt him.

But now, here, with his old wand and broken head, with Moody and with Andy’s daughter and with Shacklebolt (but not Remus) flying around and corralling Death Eaters, with Snape rushing up behind Sirius and immobilizing Bella over his shoulder, only to then try and pull him off her—Sirius remembers that his and Bella’s wands were almost completely different from each other except for one component: unyielding.

They never backed down, not as children forced to play together, not as students at Hogwarts, Slytherin versus Gryffindor, and not as young adults or adults, clashing and snarling and loathing the other to their very core.

Sirius remembers hearing about her wedding to Lestrange from Remus.

He remembers another letter from Reg, the last.

(It would have been the last letter, the last words he ever had from his brother, and it should mean more than it does.)

“Bella will never forget; nor will she forgive,” Reg had written, “and whilst Mother pretends otherwise, I know your stalwart allegiance to Dumbledore has broken her heart. Do not return here.”

“Sirius?” Snape is now asking him.

Sirius lifts his head, Reg’s voice still echoing in his ears from when they were young.

“I hate you!” Reg had screamed in the hallway just outside old creepy Slughorn’s classroom. It would have been Sirius’s fourth year, and he can picture Reg as just starting to shoot up in height, just about meeting Sirius eye to eye. “I wish you’d just die,” Reg had added, “and leave us all alone!”

And Sirius can pretend otherwise, like his mother and father and brother and cousins and the Dark fucking Lord himself, and he can lie and cheat and try to rationalize it all as the means justifying the damn ends, but he doesn’t believe and never truly has.

He’s never believed in any of it.

He’s never believed in anything.

Snape is different here in whatever this other world is that Sirius has stumbled and bumbled and tripped into. He’s looking at Sirius now with soft dark eyes and a tentative smile Sirius has never seen.

It’s uncanny.

It might be heartbreaking if Sirius still had a heart.

But Sirius is always the same, unyielding, even when he’s wrong, even when it leads to his doom, his death, his defeat.

He never changes, never has and likely never will.

Bella lies unarmed and immobilized at his feet for the first time ever, and the tide of the battle has slowly shifted to their favor, yet here Sirius stands, alone, confused, guilty.

Same as fucking ever.

Maybe he’s back in his cell.

(Or maybe this is the appropriate afterlife for someone who’s never fully known his own damn mind.)

He meets Snape’s dark eyes, and he says, “I’m not who you think I am, Snape.” And when those bottomless wells of Snape’s narrow and squint at him, when his posture shifts to startled and then quickly to defensive, holding Sirius abruptly and efficiently and gracefully at wandpoint, Sirius adds, “Maybe some Veritaserum?” in a voice he means to be joking but that comes off as just plain exhausted.


End file.
